Rapture's Decay
by ajaxicarus
Summary: Bioshock Prequel, featuring original character Garrus, later chapters will feature some of our favourite characters from Bioshock.
1. The Lighthouse

Disclaimer: I do not own Bioshock, I only own Garrus.

ooc; Please, please, please review. xD I really want to improve my writing and I also need encouragement to make sure I keep this thing going.

It wasn't the hope of a new life in a new city that attracted Garrus Vogel to Rapture, but rather, it was a place he believed he could be the farthest from that ideal. A new life was not for him, he had hardly come to terms with the old one that was so savagely stripped from him at Auschwitz. But that was a long time ago. He supposed it was because what he would most certainly call his death had so impacted his younger years, and crushed his spirit when he was still less than a decade old... he supposed all this was what made him so bitter. He gritted his teeth and fumbled for the cigarettes in the pocket of his old woolen coat-- it was threadbare, he knew, and the right pocket was full of holes and useless, but the smell of it just reminded him of...

Well, of things he kept promising himself not to think about, and trying not to think about. But any idiot knows that the more you try NOT to think about something, the more you can't help thinking about it until you're consumed by it like an inferno. Garrus had escaped the inferno the first time, though he did not consider himself one of the lucky ones. The world had already ended as far as he was concerned, and as he tucked a wayward strand of bleach blond hair(It was a long story, back when he had nowhere to go and would do anything just to be able to pretend he was someone else and forget that damned number on his arm...

The jet black was growing back in, anyway. He felt incredibly foolish about it, so he avoided mirrors.) behind a delicate ear, he lit his smoke and watched it smolder and glow. He imagined the cigarette as thousands of dead bodies, his brother, his sisters, his mother and father, going up in smoke and choking him and hurting his eyes. It was in this way, and this way only, that he felt close to them all. And so he could not give up smoking for the life of him. But being under the water was not so far from being under the earth, was it not? Here he was dead to everything that had happened in his childhood. He was a man now, he couldn't, he shouldn't waste his time brooding. It didn't suit him. What he needed was a job, what he should get was a job. A job and an apartment and maybe a girlfriend or something.

He just needed to take his mind off everything was what it was, and as he took a drag on his cigarette and looked around in the most fantastic lighthouse he had ever seen, he had a distinct feeling that everything was going to be fine. He was in a long line for the Bathosphere into Rapture, one hand casually tapping the clumsy brass pocketwatch in his trouserpocket, absentmindedly looking at the slimy whispers of light glinting off his two-tone shoes, and he would escape from the outside world forever, as both a Gypsy and a boy, hiding from the nasty people on the outside. If there was one place that could inspire the hopeless, it was Andrew Ryan's city of Rapture. It was November 5th, 1959.


	2. Smashed into Glass

ooc;; Again, I do not own Bioshock. or its lovely music, though I am learning Cohen's Masterpiece (one of many, I'm sure) on the piano

Once more, please, I implore you to review. x3

I would like suggestions to the plot, too, if you want. Of course, I'll credit you and shower you with affection.

* * *

"No Gods Or Kings, Only Man." And the head of Andrew Ryan, himself. Dark brown eyes, burned almost black with suffering, squinted slightly at the words-- had it been his imagination, or did the scarlet banner just a few moments ago read "Arbeit macht frei"? It must have been his imagination... it tended to run away with him when he was bored, or nervous. And right now, Garrus was both.

He hated waiting in lines, he could still hear them at night... "MEN LEFT, WOMEN AND CHILDREN RIGHT! SCHNELL, SCHNELL !!" Oh, the nightmares he had. They made him cower in absolute mortal terror. And he felt so weak, so hopeless and so lost and... so damned weak. Some days he felt like the only one who still cared, who was still tortured every minute by something so long ago. He thought as long as he bore the number he would be tortured, and that would be forever, at least until his skin rotted away. And it didn't seem to be going anywhere any time soon, much like the line.

The next bathosphere would be here in fifteen minutes; Garrus tossed his fag to the dampened stone floor, crushing it with the heel of his shoe, which he hated to do-- it felt like he was grinding the life out of it. And as many terrible things as he had seen, he hated to kill things-- the sight of blood was more than enough to bring all the terrible memories flooding back and it was all he could do to not vomit.

Rapture, as far as he could tell, seemed safe, unlike the rest of the world, and, also unlike the rest of the world: sane. Garrus Vogel did not expect to find blood here, for here the world was not going mad, here the world was not threatening to blow itself up in a nuclear holocaust. It would be a refuge from violence, and escape from fear. The young man shuffled his feet, impatient, self-conscious, and uncomfortable as always, and never just because he tended to tower over the majority of the population, and not because of his sad eyes... Damn it, he hated waiting in lines. His parents waited in a line, and then walked into the gas chambers and to their death. Lines meant Death... Frankly, it was a miracle he had survived, but he and his brother, who were twins, had been at least half-spared the gas, and the crematories, because they had a far nobler purpose-- serving in The Angel Of Death himself's, Dr.Mengele's medical experiments.

Garrus had never set foot near a hospital or doctor since.

"Finally." He whispered to himself, as the people in front of him started filing forward and around and downward and around and down again. Garrus, half-sick with relief, half with dread, was one of the last to step into the overcrowded Bathosphere. It was incredibly cramped, no one had an inch of space-- much like the cattle car he was in on the transport to Auschwitz... Garrus rubbed the numbers on his forearm self-consciously, though no one could see them either in the dark or under his clothes, but it was there all the same. Sometimes he swore he could feel it burning white-hot... of course, he never saw anyone about it. Or said anything. He never wanted to go to another hospital again as long as he could say his name was Garrus Braeden Vogel.

His still slightly skeletal body wound up nearly pressed against the thick glass of the bathosphere door when it began its descent-- part of him was amazed the small sphere did not simply fill with water, though he knew well enough how submarines worked. Another of man's inventions. Another tool of destruction.

He uneasily glanced at the people around him, usually too busy with their sordid affairs to pay another man an ounce of notice or compassion. Humanity never changes, really. No matter where you go, people are still full of shit. But these, maybe it was his wild imagination, or an insane hope, but these seemed different. They had kind eyes, he did not mind standing so close with them, because though he was certain they would all die eventually, it wouldn't be today. And down in Rapture, there would be no fires, and no gas. And maybe if he stayed here long enough, he, too, could learn to forget the troubles of the world above. But for now, he would smoke, and he would wait.

Like so many sheep, or perhaps cattle, the crowd migrated out of the Bathosphere and dispersed into the throng of people who already called Rapture their home. Garrus disappeared into the humming mass as well, stopping once to buy a paper, and once more to check his watch. The clock read half past noon.


End file.
